At the moment i'm working on a total conversion plugin for a game created by Ambrosia Software, known as Escape Velocity Nova. I'm apparently leading graphics, which involved ship creation.
For a full ship sprite, you have to have a full 36 frame rotation animation of the ship, along with a 36 frame rotation of the navigation lights, and engine glow.
The engine glow and light animations need to be on there own, ie: no space ship in the way. The thing is, the glows and lights also need to be blocked out by the ship on certain angles. So basically, when the engine glow or light is displayed infront of the ship, you can see the light or glow, when its half behind the ship, you can see half of it, and fully invisible when behind the ship.
What would be the best way to do this? would there be a way that I can render the 3 object rotations (ship, lights and glow) to three batches of pictures?
The only way I would know how so far is to render the ship with an absolute black texture, which can't be illuminated (the EV Nova designing software reads transparency as #000000)

Sorry for my rambling, thankyou for any help

Toe_Fungi

Oh and here's one of the ships in progress

[Link to fc45.deviantart.com]

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